Bonsai is a mod, not a panel

In Blender, G grabs whatever is selected and moves it. It is the first key anybody learns. With Bonsai enabled it is not Blender’s key any more.

Nor are X and Del, Shift-D, Alt-D, Ctrl-J, Ctrl-V, Tab, Space or Esc. Every one of them has been rebound to an operator of Bonsai’s own. These are not obscure corners of the keymap that nobody visits. They are move, delete, duplicate, join, paste and edit mode - the keys you press without deciding to.

That is the case for the word mod. It installs the way an add-on installs, out of a file, in Blender’s preferences - and then it reaches this far into the keymap, which is not something that sits politely in a corner of somebody else’s program. What you have afterwards looks like Blender and answers to different rules.

Why the keys had to move

Because the operations mean something else now. In Blender an object is a lump of geometry, and moving or deleting it moves or deletes that lump. What Bonsai edits is an IFC file - the open standard format for building models - where an object is a wall, with openings cut in it, with windows and doors sitting in those openings, and an operation that treats it as a lump gets the arithmetic right and the building wrong. Bonsai’s G understands that a wall is not travelling alone. Its X understands that removing a window means closing the hole behind it.

Which of those relationships Bonsai keeps up for you, and which it leaves to you to ask for, turns out not to be obvious at all, and it has a page of its own in What is parametric and what is not. What matters here is only why the overrides exist at all: not to be clever, but because the alternative was leaving you a familiar key that quietly did the wrong thing.

Ctrl-S is the same argument at the other end of the program: it writes your IFC file rather than a .blend. That one gets a page to itself.

Blender’s own settings are behind one of Bonsai’s tabs

The other half of the takeover is the interface. Bonsai puts a row of tabs across the top of Blender’s properties editor - project overview, geometry and materials, drawings and documents, quality and coordination, and so on, grouped by the kind of work rather than by the kind of object - and nearly everything Bonsai does is somewhere on it. Ctrl-Tab flips back to the tab you were on last, in the way Alt-Tab flips between windows, which tells you something about how much time you are expected to spend moving between them.

The last tab in that row is labelled Blender Properties. Blender’s own scene settings have not been removed, but they have been put behind it, and they are not shown unless you go there. Bonsai does this by rewriting the visibility test on Blender’s own panels.

This is not an add-on that added a panel to Blender’s interface. It is a program that took the interface over and gave Blender’s own settings a tab in its list.

Why stock Blender advice is a hazard

The practical consequence is that a Blender tutorial will not match your screen, which is a nuisance, and that its advice may be actively wrong, which is worse.

Nothing warns you. The keys look the same, the viewport looks the same, and an instruction like “select it and press X” is perfectly good Blender that now runs something else. Most of the time Bonsai’s version is what you wanted. But advice that works by going round the outside of Bonsai - applying transforms in odd ways, using Blender’s own delete or join from a menu, editing meshes that Bonsai maintains for you - can leave the IFC data saying one thing and the geometry another. The model will look fine and be wrong.

The rule of thumb is unglamorous but it holds: when a job is about the building, do it with Bonsai’s tools, even when a Blender habit would be quicker. Blender’s own tools are for when the job is about a shape.

What is still Blender

A good deal, and you will lean on it constantly.

Getting around is untouched. Orbit, pan, zoom, the numpad views, framing the selection - all Blender’s, all working exactly as they always did, and all worth learning properly if you have not used Blender before, because you will do it several thousand times. The same goes for selecting things in the viewport and for the outliner, which still lists what is in your scene.

Rendering is still Blender’s, and it is worth knowing you have it. Your model is sitting inside a program built for lighting and rendering, so a presentation image does not mean another application or an export - it means lighting the model you already have. It is a large subject and none of it is Bonsai’s business, which is why this guide says no more about it.

Mesh editing is still Blender’s too. When you need a shape that no parametric tool will give you, you go into edit mode and build it with Blender’s modelling tools, and they are the best part of Blender. Bonsai’s business is what that shape means once you come back out - which object it belongs to, which representation it is, what it is called in the file.

So the boundary is not a line across the interface. It runs between kinds of question. Where am I looking, what is selected, what shape is this is Blender. What is this thing, what is it made of, where does it belong, what is it related to is Bonsai, and that is most of the rest of this guide.

Two Blenders is a reasonable answer

Which suggests something practical, if plain Blender is also part of your work.

Rather than switching Bonsai on and off around the rest of what you do, it can be worth keeping a second installation of Blender without it, and moving between the two. Arranging that depends on your operating system and on how you install things, so this guide does not go into the how of it. The reason to consider it is the whole of this page: with Bonsai enabled the program is not the one your other work is expecting, and the keys it has taken over are the ones you press without deciding to.

If you have never used Blender, do not go and learn it first. Learn the navigation, learn what selection looks like, and come back. The rest of stock Blender is a large and interesting program that you can pick up when a job calls for it, and a fair amount of it you will never need.

Last updated 4 September 2026.